Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Allod of Acrophobia

I’ve writtenafewtimes now about Allods Online, and even posted a handful of screenshots. It’s a beautiful game, full of interesting sights. The lore of a world split into chunks, floating on the magic Astral (aetheric space with pretty blue cloudy strands of… stuff), populated by survivors of the world-shattering cataclysm, provides for some fun visual elements. The verticality of the sights can be a bit… dizzying, though. (So Ysharros, consider yourself warned…)

(As before, I’m hiding all the pretty pictures behind a More link to keep from killing anyone visiting the front page with a dialup internet connection. If you’re direct linking to this, well… sorry, but it may take a little while to load. As before, each picture is actually a link to a bigger version, if you’re looking for a closer look.)

These “Allod” things are apparently chunks of a world set adrift in some sort of breathable space, here called the Astral.

Gravity is always downward, and somehow the Allods have retained the gravity of the full parent world. (They also all appear to be on the same Cartesian plane, rather than spread out in a sphere. The game world is therefore 3D, but not really spherical or even scattered, as might be expected from a planetary destruction.) You can walk off the edge of one of these Allods, and fall a while into the Astral. (Eventually, you “land” and die out in the middle of nowhere.)

It can be a heady experience, falling off the edge of the world. This is a sequence where I found a shipwreck with part of the hull just off shore. I thought I’d jump over to check it out.

I didn’t make it.

Shipwreck off shore

So close...

...and yet so far

That’s the view looking up from where I botched the jump. As in, it’s so far off, that the clipping plane cut off the ship geometry. The angel in Purgatory was not happy with my performance.

Angel of Purgatory

She watches over you (and various other deceased characters) while your death counter ticks, then when your allotted time is up, you can revive, whisking yourself to the resurrection shrine nearest your unfortunate corpse… or the point where you fell into oblivion.

Just for reference, that blue geode asteroid… thing… you see in the “You Have Died” screen is pretty sizeable. Here are a few more shots of near the scene.

Oooh, pretty blue geode...

...I want to touch it...

...but that's quite a drop

The edge isn’t always flat, either. It can be quite varied, as can the landscape nearby or underneath… something that you wouldn’t see with a “water level” shoreline. I really like this aspect of the Allod coasts.

Wave of the shore

A coastal "ramp"

The water just falls for a while...

Crystal Island 1

Crystals make everything float, ya know?

Sometimes you travel to these places via an Astral ship like this one:

Astral ship in a port... of sorts

…but getting to that particular crystal island is an exercise in faith and magic bubbles. It’s not quite Glinda the Good Witch of the North’s technique, but Gibberlings can travel the Astral with the right help:

Just a bit of pixie dust...

...and blue crystals. This place is ca-rrrrazy.

Next time, I take a ship.

I still want one of these I can solo...

Even the inland structures have a lot of verticality. Each capital city has a BIG ol’ Spire of Pay Attention To Me (perhaps because there is no minimap in the UI, so you can see these things from far away to orient yourself).

Empire Spire

League Spire, from town

League Spire from the city walls

League Spire from the neighboring sawmill

League Spire inspiring the trees

League Spire from the docks

League Spire... in space!

You can also explore that edge of the island over there by the city walls… but it may be a harrowing experience, or at least a narrow one.

Along the wall...

...I'm glad I'm small

Even the interiors are very vertical, as this steamworks interior over on the Empire side (I stitched this together from a series of screenshots)…

Empire Steamworks

And even the caves have the occasional precipitous dropoff…

Between a fall and a fallen...

But back to the coasts of the league, there are other shipwrecks around, and it’s always interesting to check one out. It’s dangerous, living on the edge, perhaps, but I can’t help but explore.

Shipwreck ahoy!

This is the good side...

...but this view is good, too. That's a sheer drop behind me.

In case it’s not clear by now, I do think that the ships and the “Allod” lore really do make this title stand out. Perhaps it’s not a groundbreakingly revolutionary game, but its broken ground and imaginative maritime flavor sell the place for me. This is also why I wish they would make soloable and duoable smaller ships. There are a lot of pieces of the world out there, and I want to go explore them.

I’ll settle for a sunset for now, though, and sign off for the night. It’s been a long day.

Sunset coast

Gibberling naptime

Sweet dreams!

Gibberlings love gold, too

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

24 Responses

It looks like they took a look at Outland, and wanted to make it better. It too had considerable height differences and broken landscape. Unfortunately, the WoW engine couldn’t handle terrain quite like this, with the land being a simple plane of coordinates and everything more complex than that built with world map objects. Thus, all terrain edges in WoW are not really edges, just massive vertical cliffs stretching beyond the field of vision, not forming reverse cone shapes like the landmasses in Allods do.

Cool screenshots 🙂 Allods is starting to appeal to me more and more. At first I dismissed it because it just seemed to be another WoW copy but the more I read about it, the more I’m intrigued. I don’t really want to get involved in the beta but I’ll certainly check it out when it’s available. Being F2P is very enticing too.

I gotta agree that the lore sems to add a lot to it and help set it apart from other generic fantasy games. It seems like they’ve picked the best bits of what works from traditional MMORPGs and just given them a new flavour. Which is no bad thing.

BTW I’m a cold hearted, red-blooded man who hasn’t shed a tear since “the war” but even pic of the napping gerbils brought a smile to my face 😀 Awww, theys looks so cutes! 😛

I’m in the same boat where I don’t want to get too involved in the beta because I’d like to experience the game when it launches and have my work actually mean something and not be wiped. Yes, yes I know beta’ing is for finding bugs and whatnot, but still…

I’ve not seen much of Outland, so I’ll take your word for it. Allods Online is apparently part of a series of games that has been going for several years now, so they may have had their own thing going before Outland, but it would make sense to get inspiration there in one way or another. It really isn’t a revolutionary game, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s well done, and fun.

Wiqd, I can admit that these shots are all from the starter (sub-level 10) areas. I don’t want to sink too much time, either. I’ve found some bugs so far, and opined mightily on a few topics, but I’ve not played past level 8 on any character.

I’ll do that later. Maybe that makes me a bad “mainstream content locust” tester, but I can live with that. I just test different things.

The game is good, it looks a bit better than WoW and has a higher resolution. The theme is decidedly russian in look and feel, and the winged elves all have french names.

Well, Astral ships aside – this game played so much like WoW that I lost all interest! Despite this being an entirely new WoW world, it felt too similar. The questing was also less inspired – very generic K10R became quickly the norm after leaving the starter island.

There were also some odd things, like I could pull the whole forest full of lynxes and my Paladin (the MT of this game) did not take any damage. The “Damned Soul” quest mob however took more than a party, we formed a raid to kill it.

The levelling is a lot like WoW. There is no auto-attack, but it is actually not much of a problem, it is part of the system to chose between a normal and a special type attack.

The endgame seems to have less dungeons, apparently is more pvp focused (no carebear servers are planned) and the Astral Ships which apparently need at least 3 people to operate somewhat properly.

I will let others go ahead, for me it is too much like WoW, given my initial impressions – for some this might be a great thing, but it actually made me stop playing rather quickly. I even prefer Cryptic’s buggy and overpriced STO mess with horrible ground combat (I got sold by the space combat – it is Starfleet Command III online) to it at the moment.

The MMO market is a weird thing. If a game is even remotely like WoW, players will bash it for being a clone, but the mainstream won’t bother with anything that *doesn’t* play like WoW, since it’s out of the comfort zone. Allods certainly plays like WoW for the starting experience, but the PvP and forced grouping of later levels and the ships are almost more EQish, from what I’ve gathered. I suspect they are trying to ease players into the AO world by making it largely like the WoW mainstream, and diverge into left field once people are comfortable in the game. That may not be the best strategy for some (I certainly prefer more originality, which is why I wish they would do more with ships, earlier and with more variety), but I do think it’s deliberate.

Perhaps everyone has their own “WoW clone threshold”, where familiarity breeds contempt. It’s tricky to manage that threshold for a lot of players, and I suspect that devs these days are trying to cast the widest net without tipping too many people over. It’s like the dance of “innovation” vs. “familiarity”, and how true innovation often isn’t profitable at first, if ever. I’m coming from Puzzle Pirates more than WoW, so I want to get to the ships already, blast it! A WoW player may well find it too familiar for too long, but then, if it wasn’t at least similar, would they even play it?

Here’s where I ask *again* for MechWarrior Online, or even Harvest Moon Online. Pretty please?

Oh, and thanks for chipping in more screenshots! I got some decent Empire ones last night, maybe I’ll splice those in, too.

So … after 3-4 caster types, I finally made a melee and I had no idea you had to click to swing every single time. I’m sure someone mentioned it in their writing somewhere … but I didn’t know. Not sure I like that aspect of the game.

Yeah, I’m not sure I like it either, Wiqd. I’ve gotten used to it, so it doesn’t bother me a lot, but I do miss autoattack once in a while. It’s not a game breaker for me, but it is a curious design decision.

Finally figured out how to turn in my fatigue at an Innkeeper. It is an excellent boost for experience. I have tried all of the classes. I agree with the comment that there is no reason to push for the level cap when our characters will be wiped shortly.

I have noticed that it is easy to draw aggro in the newbie zones compared to other games. Especially noted this in the Empire starting city zone.

Maybe I’m missing it, but as a Warden I had 0 control bars for my pet. Coulda swore my Arisen Summoner had some controls for the robotic scorpion he had, but maybe not. I also noticed the Arisen pet was able to get and keep aggro a lot easier than my bear pet did as a Warden and sometimes, the charge ability on my Warden pet wouldn’t become active, despite fulfilling all the requirements for mana, energy, etc.

Keen over at Keen and Graev’s played a Warden, and found them to be kind of buggy as well. I’ve played one, and while I love pet classes, I just couldn’t play it for long, since it did seem that pet control wasn’t what I’d hope for.

The Charge ability is especially wonky. The description seems to bear no connection whatsoever to what it actually does. I just spam it in the hopes that it works.

I can’t help but think that’s probably not exactly good design… but maybe there is something missing in translation.

I plan on waiting till actual release to try it out. I don’t think I could handle getting to cap then having my character wiped. I’d find it hard to start over again having already seen much of the content.

I’m intrigued mostly by the incredible gunship battles I’ve been promised. I have one main concern with Allods–like any other new MMO: I don’t have RL friends playing it, which severely detracts. Are there servers and such where a lot of you guys are playing?

Dblade, I understand that. I still don’t have a character above level 8, since I’m just piddling around studying what I want to do when it’s “for reals”. No sense sinking a lot of time into it now. Sure, I’m submitting my bugs and taking pretty screenshots, but I just don’t have the time to put into grinding to the level cap in a short span like these beta tests. (One more reason that I think they should give automagically high leveled characters to testers. Y’know, so we can *test* things.)

Beej, they just recently named the servers. I’ll be playing on the Tensess server when it goes live. I have some character names in mind, but we’ll see what I can get a hold of. I’ll probably wind up playing on both Empire and League sides, but I’m still figuring out what class(es) I want to play as.

Once it’s released into the wild, I’ll post my characters for anyone interested. Whether or not anyone wants to play with a casual Explorer soloist like me is another thing entirely. 😉 Since I’m laid back, though, I’ll almost always be up for chatting.

Oh, and one more plug for Puzzle Pirates: Since that game is player skill based, there is absolutely none of the silly “you’re not at the right level to play with us” nonsense. If I’m online and you need help or want to play together, it’s trivially easy to do so in Puzzle Pirates. Not so in nearly any DIKU game. (I’m thinking here of my glacial pace through “leveling”, and how it might be suicide to invite me to man a station on an Allod Astral ship if they are level-based. That’s almost a twinkie denial condition in a game that seems to want players playing together… but if anyone can man a station on a ship and man it well based on player skill, that’s going to be a very Good bit of game design for AO. Of course, I’d be nearly useless in a boarding fight if a high level opponent boarder can one shot little old me… bah, humbug.)

hmmm im downloading allod right now (thing that grabbed me when i saw website for it was the ships….im a huge fan of the whole airship thing lol) and i read up that it takes 30-100 days of farming to get materialss to make ur own ship after u hit 35….but i still wana know…how long does it usualy take to hit 35?